Family Devotionals- Week 1: Does God exist?
DOES GOD EXIST?
A Family Devotional for the Week
Monday through Saturday
First Baptist Church of Fenton
How to Use This
Each day takes about 10 minutes. Read the short passage out loud as a family, ask the questions, and close with the prayer. The green boxes are questions written specifically for younger kids. The activity boxes give you something to do together that makes the idea stick.
You do not need to have all the answers. The goal is to make it normal in your home to ask honest questions about God. Sunday's sermon started the conversation. This week is for living inside it together.
Monday
The Question You're Allowed to Ask
Faith is not the place where thinking stops
Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
Most of us were handed an answer to the hardest question that was not really an answer. Someone asked whether God is real, and what came back was: you just have to have faith. Stop pressing.
But that is not what the Bible says faith is. The Greek word is pistis — trust based on evidence, the kind a patient puts in a doctor whose skill has been proven. The word translated assurance in Hebrews 11:1 is hypostasis, a legal term meaning title deed, the document that proves ownership in court. Biblical faith is evidence-based confidence, not the suspension of thinking.
Your questions are not a threat to your faith. They are where faith begins. And this week, we are going to follow the evidence together.
TALK ABOUT IT
1. Has anyone ever told you that asking questions about God is wrong or shows weak faith? How did that make you feel?
2. What is the difference between trusting someone for no reason and trusting someone because of what they have shown you?
For Kids
If your friend promised to meet you and they always kept their promises before, would you believe them this time? How is that like faith?
Try This Together
Ask every person at the table to finish this sentence: "One thing I have always wondered about God is..." Nobody has to have an answer. Just say the question out loud. Then tell your family: honest questions are welcome in this house.
Pray Together
God, thank you that you are not afraid of our questions. Help our family to ask honestly this week and follow the answers wherever they lead. We do not want a faith that survives by avoiding hard things. We want one strong enough to welcome them. Amen.
Tuesday
Something Cannot Come from Nothing
The universe had a beginning — and that changes everything
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Here is something everyone already knows: things do not make themselves. If you walk into the kitchen and there is a cake on the counter, you do not think the flour and eggs assembled themselves in the night. You think someone made it. That is not a complicated idea. It is one of the most basic things we know about how reality works.
For a long time, scientists believed the universe had always existed, so there was no need to explain where it came from. But in 1927, a physicist named Georges Lemaître — who was also a Catholic priest — proved from Einstein's own equations that the universe is expanding. Run that backward and everything converges to a single starting point. A beginning. Edwin Hubble confirmed it through his telescope two years later.
The universe had a beginning. And if it had a beginning, it had a cause. Whatever caused it must have existed before time, space, and matter — since all three started at the same moment. Something outside of everything we can see or measure brought it into existence.
Genesis 1:1 was written thousands of years before anyone had a telescope. It was right.
TALK ABOUT IT
1. If everything that begins to exist has a cause, what does that tell us about the universe?
2. Why do you think some people would not want the universe to have had a beginning?
For Kids
If you found a Lego castle in your room and nobody said they built it, what would you think? Could it have built itself?
Try This Together
Turn off all the lights. Sit in the dark for 30 seconds and ask your family to imagine total nothing — no space, no time, no sound, no anything. Then turn the light on and say: something had to cause this to exist. Let your kids sit with that thought.
Ask: what kind of something could do that?
Pray Together
God, you were there before there was a before. You spoke, and time itself began. Help us feel the size of that tonight — not as a fact to memorize, but as something real to stand in front of. You are bigger than we usually let ourselves think. Amen.
Wednesday
Someone Set the Dials
The universe is not just here — it is perfectly calibrated
Psalm 19:1 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
The universe did not just begin. It began exactly right.
Physicists have discovered over a hundred values built into the fabric of the universe — things like the strength of gravity and the force that holds atoms together. Every single one of them has to be set precisely right for stars, planets, or life to exist anywhere. If gravity were even slightly stronger, every star would burn out too fast. If the force holding atoms together changed by two percent, there would be no oxygen, no carbon, no water. Nothing.
Here is how precise we are talking. Imagine a ruler that stretches across the entire universe — 93 billion light years long. Move the setting for gravity by one inch on that ruler. Stars cannot form. That is the margin. One inch out of 93 billion light years.
The atheist astronomer Fred Hoyle spent his career skeptical of any God. After studying these numbers for decades he wrote that a superintellect had monkeyed with physics, and that there are no blind forces in nature. He never became a Christian. But he followed the numbers far enough to say what they required saying.
David said the heavens are declaring God's glory. The Hebrew word means to testify — to give careful, detailed evidence. The universe has been on the stand the whole time.
TALK ABOUT IT
1. If you found a watch on the ground, you would know someone made it because of how precisely it is put together. How is the universe like a watch — and how is it bigger than one?
2. What does it mean that even an atheist scientist looked at these numbers and said it looks like the work of a mind?
For Kids
Imagine trying to dial a phone number with 100 digits and getting it exactly right on the first try. How hard would that be? What if the universe did that with all its settings?
Try This Together
Get a piece of paper and write the number 1, then have each family member add as many zeros as they can. Tell them the cosmological constant — one of those universe settings — is fine-tuned to one part in a number with 120 zeros. Scientists ran out of atoms in the universe before they could write it out. Ask: does that sound like an accident to you?
Pray Together
Lord, the heavens really do declare your glory. Help us see it today — not as a slogan but as a fact. You calibrated things we did not even know existed so that we could exist. That kind of care is hard to take in. We want to take it in. Amen.
Thursday
The Law Written Inside You
Where does your sense of right and wrong come from?
Romans 2:15 They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness.
Was the Holocaust wrong?
Not just unpopular. Not just something your culture dislikes. Actually, objectively, truly wrong — wrong for every person in every culture at every point in history, whether they agreed or not.
You said yes without having to think about it. That speed matters.
If the universe is only atoms and energy and nothing else, then that conviction is just a feeling produced by evolution. It has no more authority than a preference for chocolate over vanilla. The atheist Richard Dawkins follows this logic honestly and writes that the universe has no good, no evil, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. That is materialism taken seriously.
But nobody actually lives that way. When you see someone hurt a child, you do not experience a preference. You recognize something. That is wrong. Not I dislike it. Wrong.
C.S. Lewis asked himself where that sense of wrong came from. You cannot call something crooked unless you already know what straight looks like. The standard he was using to say the universe was unjust had to come from somewhere outside the universe. It pointed to a source. Paul says that source is God, who wrote his law on every human heart.
TALK ABOUT IT
1. Where do you think the feeling that some things are truly wrong, not just unpopular, comes from?
2. If morality is just a feeling produced by evolution, why does it feel like so much more than a feeling?
For Kids
Have you ever done something wrong and felt bad even when nobody else knew? Where do you think that feeling came from?
Try This Together
Ask your family: name something that you believe is wrong for everyone, not just for you personally. Now ask: how do you know that? Where did that standard come from? Let the conversation go wherever it goes. The goal is not a tidy answer. The goal is to feel that there is something real being pointed to.
Pray Together
God, you wrote your law on our hearts so we would know you were there even before we knew your name. Thank you for the conscience that would not let us go. Give us the honesty to follow what it is pointing toward. Amen.
Friday
The Hardest Question Is Not the Evidence
On willingness, Einstein, and what we are actually afraid of
John 7:17 Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.
Albert Einstein is one of the greatest minds in history. When Lemaître showed him the mathematics proving the universe had a beginning, Einstein admitted the math was correct. Then he added a fake term to his own equations to make the universe appear eternal anyway. He called it the greatest blunder of his career.
He was not confused. He was not missing information. He knew where the evidence was pointing and chose a different direction. Why? Because a universe with a beginning pointed toward God, and that was not where he wanted to go.
That is not a story about a scientist making an error. It is a story about what happens when evidence points somewhere we are not ready to follow. And before we put that on Einstein, it is worth asking whether we do the same thing.
Jesus said something precise about this. Anyone who is willing to do what God wants will find out whether what Jesus taught is true. He placed willingness before discovery. Not because the evidence is weak. Because the evidence has always been sufficient. What changes is whether we are ready to let it land.
Following the evidence has a cost. If a personal Creator exists, the question is no longer academic. It asks something of us. And the fear of that cost can operate in the inquiry long before we admit it is there.
TALK ABOUT IT
1. Have you ever not wanted to find out the answer to something because you were afraid of what it would mean? What was it like?
2. Jesus connected willingness with discovery. Is that intellectually honest, or does it seem like a trick? Why?
For Kids
Have you ever covered your eyes during a scary part of a movie? Covering your eyes does not make the movie change. How is that like ignoring evidence about God?
Try This Together
Have each person write down one thing about God or faith they have been afraid to think about too hard. You do not have to share it unless you want to. Then pray over the papers together. The exercise is not about having answers. It is about being honest about where the resistance is.
Pray Together
God, we admit that we sometimes choose comfort over honesty. We protect the conclusions we prefer instead of following where the evidence leads. Make us willing — not because we have everything figured out, but because you are worth the cost of looking honestly. Amen.
Saturday
He Is Not Far
Getting ready for Sunday with open hands
Acts 17:27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.
Paul stood in Athens surrounded by some of the sharpest minds of the ancient world. He did not open with a Bible verse. He started with what every person in that room could already see — the structure of creation, the universal human impulse to search for something bigger, the altar they had built to a god they could not yet name.
He argued from the world they could observe toward the God who made it. And then he said something remarkable: God is not far from any one of us.
This week we followed three lines of evidence. The universe had a beginning — and its cause must be personal, powerful, and outside of time. The universe is calibrated with a precision that rules out accident. And every human being carries a moral law they did not write. All three lines point to the same place.
But cosmology is not the gospel. Knowing a Creator exists is not the same as knowing the Creator. Christianity claims something more: that this God did not stay at the level of physics. He came close. He entered history. He has a face. And Sunday we keep going.
Walk into church tomorrow with your questions. They are welcome there.
TALK ABOUT IT
1. Which of this week's conversations stuck with you most? What is still sitting with you?
2. What is the difference between knowing a Creator exists and actually knowing him personally?
For Kids
If the God who made the whole universe also knows your name and cares about you — what would you want to say to him?
Try This Together
Before bed tonight, ask each person: what is one question you want to bring to church tomorrow to ask? Write them down. After the service, pull out the list at lunch and talk about what you heard. You are not walking in as people who have it figured out. You are walking in as a family that has been thinking hard all week and wants to keep going.
Pray Together
God, we have spent this week following the evidence. The universe had a beginning. It was calibrated. You wrote your law on our hearts. And you are not far from any one of us. Tomorrow we go back to hear more. Make us ready — not just to receive information, but to encounter the person the evidence has been pointing toward all week. Amen.
Scriptures to read This Week
Hebrews 11:1 · Genesis 1:1 · Psalm 19:1 · Romans 1:19-20 · Romans 2:15 · John 7:17 · Acts 17:24-28
For Further Reading
The Reason for God — Tim Keller · Mere Christianity Book 1 — C.S. Lewis · The Case for a Creator — Lee Strobel